AAC commissioner: 'We're reinvented'

Aresco believes American is successor to Big East

May 30, 2013

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The American Athletic Conference unveiled its new logo Thursday. / Provided

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The American Athletic Conference unveiled its new logo Thursday, with commissioner Mike Aresco portraying it as “another step in the reinvention of the conference,” which will begin competition in the fall with 10 members.

The American now has a web site at www.theamerican.org, which will feature basic information on the conference and its member schools until the full version is launched on July 1.

The league, which basically is the reinvented Big East without the name and most of the schools that have left for other leagues, expects to make more announcements in coming weeks, including the site of its first men’s basketball tournament and its lineup of bowl games as it attempts to build on its Big East history while charting a new course.

“We can incorporate some of the (Big East history) with schools like Cincinnati, South Florida and UConn that have been in the Big East,” Aresco said during a teleconference with reporters, “but we’re essentially a new conference. We’re reinvented with schools coming in that have their own heritages. One of the things we’ll have to sort out is how we’re going to keep our records. It’s a little bit complicated. We’ll have a history but we’re also starting fresh.”

The league is not starting fresh when it comes to its automatic NCAA Tournament berths in men’s and women’s basketball.

“We’re a core conference,” Aresco said. “We never lost our automatic qualifier for the NCAA Tournament. In the eyes of the NCAA, all we did was change our name. We’re the successor to the Big East Conference. It’s nothing more than a name change.”

The 10-team men’s conference tournament will be held from Wednesday through Saturday before Selection Sunday, with all games being televised by one of the ESPN channels. The time of the championship game on Saturday has not been determined.

The American also retains its automatic qualifying status in the BCS for football during the final year of the present setup. As it sets its future bowl tie-ins, it will attempt to keep some of the arrangements that existed for the Big East.

“The bowl picture is starting to become clarified a bit,” Aresco said. “We’re talking to our incumbent partners. Obviously, there are some things that have changed. We think we can have as many as six, seven or eight and I wouldn’t even rule out nine tie-ins. I think we’ll have more tie-ins than we had the last time.

“We want to play teams from the five (major) conferences and we want to play teams from other conferences as well. We’ve also talked about starting our own bowl game and we’re pretty far along with a plan. We think we can find a good opponent.”

Aresco said the league has no plans to expand once the membership settles at 12 schools when Navy joins for football-only in 2015. Those 12 schools are UC, South Florida and Connecticut from the old Big East plus Central Florida, East Carolina, Houston, Memphis, Navy, SMU, Temple, Tulane and Tulsa.

“We’re very happy with the 12 we have,” Aresco said. “We think we’re a very, very strong conference now. No one can predict where conference realignment will go down the road, but it does appear there’s a period of stability now. Our group feels very good about this conference. We feel that it has a real future. We think there’s a period of stability coming and we intend to take advantage of it.”